A Strong Leader for A Time of Crisis: Xi Jinping’s Strongman Politics as A Collective Response to Regime Weakness

Baranovitch, Nimrod

doi:10.1080/10670564.2020.1790901

Cited by 18 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…The underlying premise behind this, however, is that a new leader may choose different goals and ways while using the same national resources as the previous one; it is hardly imaginable that he or she may produce new resources. This line of thinking can partly be associated with the traditional conception of power in international politics as primarily based on material factors that are property of the state, not the individual 2 . With the advent of the concept of "soft power" to the IR disciplinary discourse, the understanding of what counts as power "resources" or "assets" broadened substantially, but there is still no general consensus of what soft power is based upon 3 and whether actors can be treated as "resources" themselves.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Popular Leader as an Asset of Soft Power: The Ratings of National Leaders and their Countries Abroad

Isoda

2024

Baltic Journal of Law &Amp; Politics

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The original concept of soft power embraced the belief that culture, values and foreign policy practice are the basic resources upon which this type power is based. This article argues that popular national leaders can also – maybe even more so – be treated as soft power resources as their popularity and trustworthiness go hand in hand with the positive public opinion about their countries abroad. This hypothesis is tested against survey data collected from all over the globe by the U.S.-based polling institute Pew Research Center over the last two decades. The data shows a strong positive correlation between the public confidence in a leader and the view of their country abroad in almost every case that was examined. The view of a country among foreign audiences often changes with the change of its top leadership. The results of this reseach cast doubt on whether national culture and values rather than national leaders are the preeminent source of soft power of any given country in international politics.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Popular Leader as an Asset of Soft Power: The Ratings of National Leaders and their Countries Abroad

Isoda

2024

Baltic Journal of Law &Amp; Politics

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“…Authoritarian rule, and more specifically the rule of a “strongman,” is rapidly spreading around the world (Repucci and Slipowitz 2022). Strongman rule can in fact be detected in Russia, China (Pei 2018; Baranovitch 2021), South Asia (Sud 2022), South East Asia (Morgenbesser 2016; Ramos 2021), the Pacific Island States (Fraenkel 2019), South America (Roth 2017), the Middle East and North Africa (Abadeer et al 2022), and in Sub‐Saharan Africa (Owoyemi 2022).…”

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confidence: 99%

Traditional Practices and Support for the Strongman

Pelizzo,

Kuzenbayev

2023

World Affairs

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The new modernization theory has suggested that the pervasiveness of traditional values has a clear impact on the quality of democratic governance. In this contribution to this special issue on the political consequences of traditional beliefs, we explore whether and to what extent the pervasiveness of traditional values and beliefs has a detectable impact on authoritarian attitudes. Specifically, we analyze the relationship between the support for a “strongman” and the acceptability of traditional practices for Muslim respondents from 27 jurisdictions. The results suggest that those who believe that traditional practices, such as the use of sorcery, appealing to jinn, and to the souls of ancestors, are acceptable under Islam are more likely to prefer a strongman to democracy. Notably, we found that respondents’ religiosity does not significantly affect their support for a strongman, raising questions about how accurately traditionality has been measured so far.

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“…Conversely, the "lost decade" of the Hu-Wen administration could not transform China's regime into a more collective leadership. The inertia of Hu-Wen leadership was not particularly strong, while both internal and external environmental factors remained favourable for a low-accountability equilibrium (Baranovitch, 2021).…”

Section: Conditions Of Changementioning

confidence: 92%

“…During the period of the Hu-Wen administration when the leadership was relatively more collective, there is evidence that repression was less overt, less proactive, and more tolerant than it is in the current Xi era (Fu & Distelhorst, 2017;Yao Li & Elfstrom, 2021). Some scholars have even suggested that the rise of Xi Jinping was due to an elite perception that China faced an existential crisis under the "weak" leadership of the Hu-Wen administration and therefore needed to return to strongman politics (Baranovitch, 2021;S. Lee, 2017).…”

Section: Alternative Explanationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…internal game between the ruler and the selectorate so that the latter accepts the former's power consolidation instead of the current outcome (see In the real world, rulers can achieve this by either initiating purges against opposing selectorates (usually in the name of an anti-corruption campaign) or bolstering the rhetoric of the urgent need for "tough" leadership to deal with "internal" crises (Baranovitch, 2021). The rise of Nguyen Phu Trong in the last decade vividly illustrates this prospect (Tran Le Quynh, 2021).…”

Section: Percentagementioning

confidence: 99%

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Political Accountability, State Capacity, and Authoritarian Resilience in Vietnam and China

Nguyen¹

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This research explains why Vietnam and China have different configurations of state capacity and how these differences affect their resilience and prospect of political change. The main argument is that there is a strong, dynamic relationship between political accountability and state capacity which shapes distinctive paths of regime development in the two countries. As a high-accountability regime, Vietnam has an expansive governance capacity which emphasises universally redistributive social policies, a tax-based extractive capacity, and a fragmented control capacity. By contrast, China’s low-accountability regime builds on a unique model of a quasi-tax, quasi-domain, and quasi-rent extraction, a cohesive governance capacity which prioritises efficiency, and a high level of control capacity. Having helped both regimes thrive through the past four decades, the two models nevertheless expose them to different sets of problems. While Vietnam is more susceptible to exogenous changes, China is more vulnerable to endogenous ruptures and decay. The thesis adopts a mixed research approach which combines historical institutionalism in examining large processes of macro-level variables and the rational-choice analysis in studying the immediate-strategic context with key actors’ interactions, choices, and payoff perceptions. A nested game framework is used to explain how political accountability has developed and diverged in the two seemingly similar regimes in Chapter 2. It argues that events in the critical juncture of the late 1980s, particularly the Tiananmen Incident, drastically changed the Chinese leadership’s payoff perceptions of the political equilibrium and accordingly kept the regime firmly in the low-accountability track. Without a similar rupture, a system of collective leadership has been developed and preserved in Vietnam, which steered the regime towards a high-accountability path. The impacts of the divergence in political accountability on the developments of extractive, governance, and control capacities are then explored. Chapter 3 explains why Vietnam has been moving towards a tax state, whilst China remains a unique model of a quasi-tax, quasi-rent, and quasi-domain state. Chapter 4 traces the two regimes’ policy preferences to account for the difference between Vietnam’s egalitarian approach of governance and China’s “efficiency first” strategy. The contrasting fortunes of Ho Chi Minh City and Shanghai, the two countries’ economic centres, are presented for illustration. Chapter 5 discusses the diverging control capacities, arguing that China’s personalised regime requires a higher level of legitimation and repression. Chapter 6 speculates about how differences in state capacity affect the resilience of the two regimes and their prospects of political change. The thesis makes use of a wide range of both primary and secondary data. An original biographical database of 626 members of the Vietnamese Communist Party’s Central Committee members from 1986 to 2016 and the Vietnam’s Provincial Security Dataset from 2011 to 2018 have been constructed. Qualitative evidence is drawn from the two regimes’ internal documents, particularly various volumes from the Selections of Important Documents of the Communist Party of China and the Compilations of the Vietnamese Communist Party Documents. The thesis provides much needed insight into the relationship between political accountability and state capacity in one-party regimes, offers a novel explanation of the different resilience strategies of Vietnamese and Chinese communist rulers, and contributes to the scholarship on critical junctures and political change.

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A Strong Leader for A Time of Crisis: Xi Jinping’s Strongman Politics as A Collective Response to Regime Weakness

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

Popular Leader as an Asset of Soft Power: The Ratings of National Leaders and their Countries Abroad

Popular Leader as an Asset of Soft Power: The Ratings of National Leaders and their Countries Abroad

Traditional Practices and Support for the Strongman

Political Accountability, State Capacity, and Authoritarian Resilience in Vietnam and China

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